


Faulted

by MiniNephthys



Category: Hello Charlotte (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Canon, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-06-06
Packaged: 2018-11-09 22:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11113764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MiniNephthys/pseuds/MiniNephthys
Summary: Anri, after Charlotte gets her happy ending.





	Faulted

When someone kills themself, there’s always sympathy, no matter whether they were loved or hated in life.

Charlotte and Vincent’s bodies are found in the forest near the school. There’s an announcement, just like the one had for Scarlett. Exactly the same, except the names are changed. Anri wonders if she’ll be able to recite it by memory, the next time they’re gathered in the assembly hall to listen to the principal talk about the value of life.

The murmurings from her classmates are different. Scarlett was intimidating, but not disliked - she was beautiful, intelligent, athletic, anything a girl could aspire to be. Charlotte and Vincent were the weirdos, the ones who babbled about maggots and gods, the ones who had their books ripped up and their faces punched in.

“Was it because of how they were treated?”

“Bullying can get pretty bad sometimes, huh…”

The students are good people, or they like to think of themselves that way. They’d never drive two teenagers to suicide just because they were weird. So even though Anri knows that the girl mumbling how sad it all is emptied Charlotte’s bag into the mud, and the boy who wonders if there’s going to be some kind of funeral - does anyone know if those two have family at all? - left a bruise on Vincent’s face that didn’t heal for days, it wasn’t their fault. They were playing pranks, or just hazing them a little. It’s everyone else who was cruel to them.

Of course, Anri hasn’t made her association with Charlotte a secret, though everyone else thought of it as ‘taking pity on her’, and they weren’t wrong. Still, Anri’s Charlotte’s closest thing to a friend, and since they can’t ask the dead why this happened, her classmates turn to Anri.

“You were her friend, right? Did you know she was going to do this?”

“Did she seem weirder than normal, before she died?”

“Couldn’t you have done something?”

Anri’s response is the same. “If I’d known it was that bad, don’t you think I would have stopped her?!”

Of course she knew Charlotte was being mistreated, because she mistreated her herself. She counts up the number of times she forgot to bring lunch money and had Charlotte pay for her, the number of times she yelled at Charlotte for something that was an accident, the number of passive-aggressive insults she flung at her friend that Charlotte never seemed to notice, and wonders which number ticked Charlotte over from ‘alive’ to ‘dead’.

Her parents pay attention to her, for a little while. They ask her how she’s feeling, whether she’d like to go out and do something as a family again. That’s all Anri’s ever wanted from them.

But she didn’t want it to be because of this.

It’s back to the same scolding the next time her grades come in and her parents see that she’s doing poorly. Compared to getting their “love” through her friend’s death, being pushed to be absolutely perfect again is almost a relief.


End file.
